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Microsoft Orange SPV Phone Review
Ian Bell writes "HowardChui.com just posted a review on Microsoft's new Orange SPV which is the first commercially available Smartphone. The SPV stands for Sound, Pictures, Video and you can download games like Doom or listen to MP3s on the speaker or even chat to your friends using the built-in MSN Messenger. But for all that the SPV features, there is no Bluetooth support. It still looks like a killer phone and I like that it is smaller than the PocketPC phones currently on the market."
Your phone has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down
Either the phone is small or his head is really big. Hard to tell.
I was deriding the Yopy a couple days ago for having a chiclet keyboard. This thing's got a chiclet keypad. Make it bigger!
Add to that the fact that you're going to get face-grease all over the screen every time you talk on the phone. I don't see any reason to get one of these yet.
I have been pwned because my
Guy says in the review that the audio isn't that great, thus flushing the functionality of mp3 playing and making its usefulness as a cell phone kinda crappy.
That's a shame too because it looks like an nice phone and has some decent feature.
I believe, as an Apple fan, that Apple should make a really good phone for all us geeks wishing we had big wallets. They could get Jonathan Ive to do it, and put a *scaled-down* version of OS X on it. Plus, they could call it the iPhone! (It has a *ring* to it, yuk yuk...) I would definitely buy one (if I had said big wallet).
Look at all the Pros. None of that makes a good phone. Who cares about a customizable today screen or an optional keyboard when the phone sucks.
He is obviously clueless...
"While it seems to lack a little bit of polish as the first commercially available Smartphone, the SPV is not a bad device. "
Erm, It isn't the first commercial smartphone. Symbian phones have been around for a while, years in fact - for example, Erccisson R380 (I think there was a version before this one?), and Nokia - the Brick - Communicator 9210 - and there was a version before this too.
With Symbian you get a rock solid phone and software, far more than MS can possibly provide. Symbian phones have far better security and their OS isn't bloated, as opposite to MS its in pathetic (toy) OSes.
That's just a little freaky in my books.
...no one's gone ahead and tried to run Linux on it yet...where's my modchip?
That phone is silver, not orange.
Why the hell is it taking PDA/Cell Phone/MP3 Player/Keyboard/Mouse manufacturers so DAMN long to get bluetooth implemented as a standard across the board for syncing devices, which is what it's particulary good at - close distance, high bandwidth traffic. It's beginning to really piss me off since it has the implications to be so useful.
I urge for the day i can use my iPod as a clicker device to go to the next slide in a presentation, or when i can set my iPod next to my laptop and automatically sync it. I urge for the day i can walk into a room with a bluetooth keychain and have my pre-programmed computer automatically turn the lights on and start playing music ala Minority report. We *HAVE* the technology to do all this, why the hell are hardware manufacturers kicking their damn heals so much?
ok i'm done ranting
</RANT>
- tristan
If I'm going to buy a phone, make sure it makes phone calls!
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
So why would anyone buy this phone at all?
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
From ZDNet UK....slightly amusing...but a valid point, none the less.
Smartphone (with a capital S) is Microsoft's brandname for... smartphones (duh!). They've copyrighted the name, so that's what Howard means when he writes "first commercially available Smartphone".
I've played with the phone myself, and the OS isn't bloated compared to the Symbian phones (they're about the same). In fact, my Nokia 3650, which uses Symbian, crashes every now and then. I'm not saying the MS one doesn't crash, but don't think because it's made by someone other than Microsoft that it's automagically better.
I want someone to realise that I always carry around my wallet, my keys and my phone.
Why is it, therefore, that we don't see a combination smartphone/pda/wallet? An average wallet is large enough to put a decent-sized LCD screen and a keypad in (after all, many wallets are quite similar in design to a clamshell-type 'phone).
This would be a kick-ass device because it'd have a big screen *and* reduce the amount of space everything takes up in my pockets. Surely it's the obvious thing to do?
Hang on - given it's obvious, I'll just off and patent it...
Looks more like a lemon to me.
I really don't see any decent reason for packing cell-phones with so many features. How about making the cell phone have better reception so call-drops are less frequent, instead of being able to download mp3s to play them on the cellphone speakers. It's extra features like that which turn it into more of a novelty item than something that could have pratical use. I would like my phone to dial numbers, call people, and sound clear... I really don't see the use in downloading quake or Microsoft patches for security so no one can run illegal scripts off my cellphone if I happen to be using it for a server or something.
SecondPageMedia - Wha
Bollocks!
First Orange is a network operator, not a cell phone manufacturer. Second, the phone is made by HTC and resold in a few countries by different operators. Orange had no say in the design. Now it seems that they neuteured the phone by preventing the user from installing unsigned software while not working with developers to provide them with a easy way to sign their apps.
Nobox: Only simple products.
Been using it for the last few months and it is AWFUL !
Sure it sounds great, colour screen, plays mp3s, core PDA functionality, web browsing and email using GPRS (I signed up for 7 megs a month because I thought this would be useful).
But it is terrible !
So what's the problem ? Well it hangs. All the time. I get busy cursors when all I'm doing is navigating the menus. It hangs when I'm trying to make a call (it seems to get its knickers in a twist if an incoming call arrives whilst your starting an outgoing call.
Personally I'm really pissed off at having skipped the Ericsson (which I thought was too big) for this pile of shit. Been very happy with every Orange 'phone I've ever owned (been an Orange customer since they opened up here in the UK) but the SPV stinks. Edward
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
These things have been out in the UK for so long that version 2 is being released!
Granted, this is because version 1 was so poor that no one brought one - less than 100k units were shipped (which considering that there are about 10m sales/yr of high end phones in the UK is terrible). And that number was _after_ they started giving them away for free with a £25/mnth contract.
Microsoft fucked up by making a bad phone - not really a surprise - and the only people who brought them were the XBox-modder wannabe-techie types who wouldn't know the different between C and Cobol.
The most amusing part is that the only reason these phones sold _at all_ was because the DRM functions (you can only run executables signed by Orange and Microsoft) were broken by hackers very quickly - in fact for the French version it only required a reboot to execute. Now thats great security!
Annoying never fixed bugs include numbers stored in a different way from Outlook/OE so that when you sync your phonebook you can't dial the numbers it downloaded, text messaging that randomly doesn't work, out-of-memory errors, and a phone so large and butt ugly it belongs in 1980.
Another stunning victory then - Nokia must be quaking in their boots.
Beep beep.